My mental model for them is plinko boards. Your prompt changes the spacing between the nails to increase the probability in certain directions as your chip falls down.

i literally suggested this metaphor earlier yesterday to someone trying to get agents to do stuff they wanted, that they had to set up their guardrails in a way that you can let the agents do what they're good at, and you'll get better results because you're not sitting there looking at them.

i think probably once you start seeing that the behavior falls right out of the geometry, you just start looking at stuff like that. still funny though.